La Caisse Nationale d’Assurance Vieillesse (CNAV, or the National Old Age Insurance Fund) has improved its IT system support and development with Citrix’s TRM Services

CNAV manages the pension branch of the General Social Security System. With a membership of 10,3 million private sector employees, it’s the largest pension plan in France. CNAV has 14.200 collaborators who work at 2.400 service centres throughout mainland France and the French overseas territories. To manage its business, CNAV has a vast IT system. The Nantes Technical Centre provides the technical expertise behind the Citrix infrastructure. CNAV, a Citrix client for over 10 years, has a number of server farms using Citrix XenApp 5 (comprised of 1.000 servers and thousands of users) and Citrix XenDesktop.

The Challenge: Customized support for CNAV throughout France

With over a thousand servers and thousands of Citrix users across France, it was crucial for CNAV to receive dedicated, customized assistance from its own technical support teams. In other words, CNAV should be able to quickly resolve, sometimes even anticipate, incidents within its IT infrastructure to prevent pension management disruptions. The technical teams in Nantes must also ensure proper implementation of its IT projects in CNAV’s regional offices and upgrade CNAV’s IT system to meet its future needs.

To provide the best-possible assistance to technical support teams and meet their specific needs, CNAV has opted for Citrix’s Technical Relationship Manager (TRM) services. CNAV’s TRM, is very familiar with CNAV’s infrastructure and its challenges and can, in turn, provide customized assistance, quickly identifying — even anticipating — incidents that may occur at the IT system’s core. The main tasks of the TRM are to ensure they have a good understanding of the solutions that the customer is undertaking, and by representing the customer within Citrix help guide them to success by introducing consulting and education where appropriate.

Beneficios principales

Clear added value over conventional support

The Citrix TRM is available three days a week and up to 25 days per year on-site to troubleshoot incidents that cannot be handled by CNAV’s central IT teams, validate any changes that may impact the Citrix infrastructure and its stability, successfully implement projects for the regional CNAV offices and help teams to upgrade the infrastructure, allowing, for instance, CNAV to discover and test new solutions. For example, the Citrix TRM greatly helped CNAV’s teams throughout the last CPS migration to XenApp 5, both upstream (including prototyping, migration scenario choices and validation procedures) and during the implementation with, above all, certain regional site coordination.

Assistance throughout France

According to CNAV, one of the many key benefits of a Citrix TRM is the time he or she saves its technical support teams. Given this expert’s considerable involvement with CNAV’s technical support teams and tailored follow-up, the Citrix TRM does not need to revisit any past incidents to grasp the one at hand. What’s more, the Citrix TRM, as a dedicated, single point of contact for CNAV, can monitor the technology behind every Citrix product integrated into CNAV’s IT system and, in turn, proactively inform of must-have upgrades, validate them and take steps to ensure their smooth implementation in each region.

Looking Ahead

With a Citrix TRM, CNAV’s technical support teams can keep pace with the latest versions of Citrix’s solutions to anticipate CNAV’s future needs and, in turn, upgrade its infrastructure accordingly. Plus, the recent launch of XenDesktop 7 has encouraged CNAV and Citrix to take a close look at its implementation. Ultimately, CNAV will be well prepared — when the time comes to launch a new migration program or troubleshoot internal issues.